


The Photograph

by Licoriceallsorts



Category: FFVII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-08
Updated: 2011-06-08
Packaged: 2017-10-20 06:19:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/209670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Licoriceallsorts/pseuds/Licoriceallsorts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Memories of Tseng's childhood.  Reno is curious about the photograph the Director of the Turks keeps on his desk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Photograph

 

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” said Reno. “That guy with the hat. He your granddad, by any chance?”

            It was a slow day in the Department of Administrative Research. Reno, who’d stopped by to shoot the breeze, had put his feet up on the corner of Tseng’s desk, and was pointing at the small tinted photograph, six inches by six, that Tseng kept in a camphorwood frame.

            “No,” Tseng replied.

            “I kind of like it,” said Reno, picking up the frame to take a closer look. “With that fog steaming up, and the sun trying to break through. There’s sort of a mystical vibe to it.  Reminds you of home, huh?”

            “I wouldn't say that. I simply enjoy looking at it.”

            “What’s that thing he’s holding? Wutaian pixie trap?”

            Tseng leaned forward and held out his hand.  Reno made a face, but gave him the picture back. “Yeah, don’t say it,” he sighed, rising to his feet. “Break’s over. I guess I _could_ find some work to do. Catch you later, Boss…”           

            Once Reno had shut the door behind him, Tseng began to tidy his desk, carefully re-aligning the picture to its customary angle. He had told Reno the truth about the figure in the hat. It was not his grandfather, who had died before he was born. It was his grandmother. She’d been forty-one years old when the picture was taken. Tseng had been ten. He’d written a big exam only the day before; all the ten year old boys in the village, and all the ten year old boys in all the villages in Wutai, had sat the same exam on the same day. If a boy did well in the exam, he could expect to be summoned by the Emperor to the palace in the city. There were many stories about what might happen then. Some involved dragons; some, princesses. All promised adventure.

            On the morning of the examination his mother had wakened him, dressed him, fussed over his sash, combed his hair, prepared a bowl of rice and smoked eel for his breakfast. He was too excited to eat.  Watching him pick at his food, the sadness in her eyes deepened. “Little prince, are you in such a hurry to leave me?” she asked. “The Emperor has a hundred sons. This poor mother has only one. Soul of my heart, if you wrote the wrong answers on purpose, nobody but Leviathan would ever know.”

            This was nonsense, of course. They would all know. Everyone knew he was the cleverest boy in the village. Tseng was afraid that she might start crying, or, worse, insist on walking with him to the village hall where the examination was being held. She might even try to hold his hand.  If he had had a father, the two of them could have walked together, as the other boys did with their fathers. But his father had been dead for so many years that Tseng barely remembered him any more. He was a boy being raised by women. He was already as tall as his grandmother, and stronger than his mother. He chose to walk alone.

            Nevertheless he permitted his mother to accompany him as far as the front gate, where his grandmother was waiting for them, clutching a fistful of weeds she had just pulled from the garden. “Good luck,” she said to Tseng, pressing her thumb to the blessing-mark tattooed on his forehead. Then she put her arm around her daughter’s waist and held her tight. “Let him go on his own,” she said.

            Until he came to Midgar, it had never occurred to Tseng to think of their family as poor. His grandmother was a hard worker and an instinctive businesswoman. His mother kept the house and wove rugs that she sold to the landlord’s agent. Poverty was a relative concept; by village standards, he had no cause for complaint.  There was always food in the house; he slept on a quilt instead of a plain straw mat, and only went barefoot because the shoes his mother had bought him pinched his toes.  If he needed new brushes for school, or ink, or paper, all he had to do was ask.

            But there was a wider world out there, beyond the rice paddies in the valley bottom and the cloud forests of the encircling mountains. Intimations of that world were all around him – above all, in the village store.  When he wasn’t at school, or helping his mother and grandmother in the field, Tseng liked to spend time leaning against the store’s dusty counter, his thoughts wandering among the colourful marvels that stocked its shelves. How many unnecessary yet desirable things there were in this world! He wondered who had made them, and how from how far away they had come. Ball-point pens - he wanted one so badly. Bottles of soda pop, flavoured like no fruit he’d ever tasted. Specially softened and whitened rolls of paper for wiping the backside after shitting.  Now, who had thought of that?

            When the landlord’s agent came to the village on quarter days to collect the rent money, he rode a shiny dark blue bicycle. It had a bell on the handlebars, and its tyres boasted brilliant white rims. Three times in Tseng’s memory the landlord himself had passed through the village in his fine yellow motorcar. Once, during the rainy season, the car had got stuck in the mud on the outskirts of the village, and everyone had dropped what they were doing to help pull it out, the men, the boys, and even the women and girls rushing eagerly for a chance to touch the glossy machine.  On the bonnet of the car there was a large red diamond, and some writing in a language that Tseng recognized, though he could not read it; the same symbols were stamped into the soles of the plastic flip-flops his mother and grandmother wore around the village. Whenever they stepped on soft earth, they left the imprint of those two characters behind.

            Arriving at the village hall, Tseng joined the other two dozen boys who were waiting outside. Some of them had come from miles away. Not long afterwards, the doors opened, and the headman came out to usher the boys to their places. Tseng sat at the desk provided, took a deep breath, and looked around. Straight away he noticed the two strangers standing against the wall.  One was a human being. The other was a goblin-man. 

            After his first start of surprise faded, Tseng quickly looked down; he was far too proud to stare, but while he waited for the papers to be distributed he studied the goblin carefully out of the corner of his eye. He’d never seen a real one in the flesh before. It – or _he_ , since Tseng presumed it was male – had thick, colourless curly hair sticking up all over his head, and eyes that looked blind, or perhaps were covered with some sort of blue film; nevertheless, he could apparently see with them as well as any real person. He smiled a bit too widely when he looked at the assembled children, but his teeth were not _very_ pointy. Tseng suspected that most of the things people said about the goblin-men were probably not true, anyway.  More likely, it was just another way of trying to frighten the children into staying in the village.  Goblin-men came from _out there_ , like all the best things did, cars and bicycles, toilet paper and ball point pens.  If Tseng passed this exam, he might get the chance to go there, too.              

         Both the human stranger and the goblin stranger were wearing clothes like the clothes the landlord’s agent wore, made of heavy material with lots of fastenings and pockets, high-collared white shirts, and a kind of ribbon knotted tightly around the neck. Embroidered into the ribbon was the same red diamond and gold characters that Tseng had seen on the bonnet of the landlord’s car, and on the soles of the women’s shoes. The two men, human and goblin, looked hot and uncomfortable in their suits, but also serious and important.  Their polished black leather shoes were the most beautiful things Tseng had ever seen. For the first time in his life he felt ashamed of his bare feet, and tucked them carefully under his bottom where they couldn’t be seen.

            The questions on the exam were easy. Tseng returned home feeling elated and guilty. He could see his mother had been crying. Over dinner, his grandmother asked him briefly if the morning had gone well, and then they did not speak of it again. He rested, spent the rest of the afternoon working in the field, and then in the evening joined the other boys hanging around the headman’s house hoping for a glimpse of the goblin-man. While they waited, they talked over the exam, checking with Tseng to see if they had got the answers right. “Of course, you will pass,” they said. Modesty prevented him from agreeing out loud. The goblin man failed to put in an appearance, and eventually they all went home.

            The next morning his grandmother woke him from his bed. It was so early the sun had barely begun to rise. His mother was still sleeping.  “You’re going to be needing money,” his grandmother said. “Come on, you can help me.”

            She put on his dead grandfather’s old waxed felt boots, wrapped the bark-cloth rain-cape around her shoulders, tied the wide straw hat onto her head. Handing Tseng a fox-trap, she picked up two more, one in either hand, and together they set off through the gathering light, up the path that led in to the cloud forests. Pine needles lay thick upon the ground. The smell of wet earth and pine trees and greenery was so strong that it went to Tseng’s head; bursting with joy, he had to run, his bare feet making no sound on the springy path.

            “Ssst,” his grandmother called him back. “This is a good place.”

            They laid one of her traps, walked on for another twenty minutes, and laid another.  The agent would pay good money for the tails. Tseng wondered what happened to the tails once the agent had taken them.  Where did they go? Who wanted them? What for?

            “Foxes are clever,” he said to his grandmother. “Can’t they see that it’s a trap?”

            “Oh, they know,” she replied. “But their curiosity is too much for them. They can’t resist taking a peek inside.”

            “And then they’re sorry.”

            “Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows what a fox thinks? Let’s put this last one by the spring. That never fails.”

            Running up the hill ahead of her, Tseng rounded a bend in the path and saw the goblin man.  He was standing with his back to Tseng, looking out across the tree-tops, but when he heard Tseng’s breathing and the crack of the twig under Tseng’s foot he turned around, looked at him blindly, and smiled.  Even though Tseng knew it was childish to be frightened, that goblin smile unnerved him; he dropped his gaze to the level of the stranger’s chest, and saw that he was holding in his pale hands a small, solid object made of metal and plastic. It looked like some kind of machine.

            The stranger spoke. Of course, it was gibberish. Unsure of the correct protocol for addressing a goblin, Tseng decided to play it safe, and bowed deeply, saying nothing.  Still, he couldn’t tear his eyes from those noodle-white hands and that little machine. He’d never seen one before, but he thought he could guess what it was.

            The stranger noticed his interest. “ _Camera,_ ” he said, and then made a gesture that was the universal language for _here, take a look._

Curiosity triumphed over wariness. Tseng came closer, and the stranger showed him where to put his eye to the glass window, and how pressing a button would make a little door flick open and then closed so fast that if you blinked you missed it. Which was all very interesting, but what Tseng really wanted to know was how did it actually _work,_ inside?  He could only imagine it like an eye holding a memory.  But how did it hold them? Where did it store them? And how did you get the pictures _out_ of this machine?

            Just then his grandmother appeared around the corner. The stranger said something which Tseng interpreted as _go on, try it._ So he did.

            “Foreign devil!” she cried, waving her fist at them.

            The stranger looked alarmed. He probably thought she was angry. But Tseng could see she was laughing. She walked up, took the camera, turned it over and over in her hands, examining it. “I could make a fortune with one of these,” she grinned, showing all her missing teeth. “When you are a rich foreign devil, my boy, I want you to buy me one.”

.

Seven years later, Tseng ran into the stranger again. Three weeks after joining the company, he was sitting eating lunch in the Shinra cafeteria, when a middle aged man wearing a Human Resources Department tie approached him - rather tentatively, as people were wont to do. The combination of Wuteng features and Turk suit was understandably daunting.  “Excuse me,” said the man, “But don’t I know you? You look familiar.”

            The goblin’s hair was thinner, and his waistline had expanded, but his eyes were still blindly blue. 

            “I knew you were going places as soon as I saw your exam results,” he said. “That was some score you racked up. Did you know it’s never been beaten?”

            He did not ask to sit down. Tseng did not suggest it. They chatted, awkwardly, for a couple of minutes. It had been easier when they did not speak the same language. Finally the stranger said, “Well, must get back to work. Oh, by the way, I still have a print of that photo you took. If I can find it, I’ll put it in your pigeonhole.”

            The man was as good as his word. And so Tseng set the photo in the camphorwood frame, which had been made in Wutai but which he’d bought at the Marroniers department store in Sector Eight, and placed it on his desk, where he could look at it when he was in the mood to remember.

            The night before he’d left home, he and his grandmother had stayed up packing.  His mother, exhausted from weeping, had fallen asleep in the next room. Making sure that she could not hear him, Tseng asked his grandmother, “Why doesn’t she marry again? She’s still young. She could have more children.”

            “That one is unlucky. All her men either die or they leave her. No man wants that curse on his head.  If you’d stayed here, you’d have ended up unlucky too. It's better to take your fate into your own hands. I think you’ve made the smart choice.”

            Out of his first paycheck he bought his grandmother the camera she’d asked for, and over the years that followed she’d made, if not quite the fortune she’d predicted, at least a decent income, recording memories of newborn babies and weddings and dead folks laid out in their coffins.  While she was still learning how to use her new camera she’d sent him a picture she‘d taken of herself and his mother, slightly out of focus, stiff hair, stiff postures, stiff smiles. He kept it in a drawer in his apartment. 

            With subsequent paychecks he had bought his mother a bigger house - more fields - strong arms to work in the fields, and help around the house. Twice he’d been back to see her. She looked smaller each time. On both occasions she had berated him: “Where is my daughter-in-law? Where are my grandsons?” The visits had ended in tears. After his grandmother died, he didn’t go back any more.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is not my usual backstory for Tseng. It was written for "The Picture Game" at the Genesis Awards, here:  
> http://www.genesisawards.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=6737  
> but ended up being too long to post there in its entirety.  
> I guess I should add something about the picture. First of all, it's not mine. If it's yours, let me know and I will either remove it or credit you, as you prefer.  
> Secondly, while I presume it's a picture of a scene in Japan, or maybe China, my description of Tseng's village is not intended to be specifically Japanese. If anything, it's based on my experiences of village life in rural Africa.  
> Tseng, Reno, Shinra and Wutai are the intellectual property of Square Enix.


End file.
